Red, White and Lance

When Lance Armstrong announced his intention of coming out of retirement last September to ride one more time for the yellow jersey of the Tour de France, an event he's won a record seven times, he couldn't have picked a better moment. The stock market was in full plummet, our standing in the world was at a nadir, and watching as our 401(k)s halved and job losses mounted, we as a nation were in the throes of a feeling we hadn't experienced since the Great Depression: a contagion of palpable fear. From afar, one could almost hear the French snickering into their goblets of Bordeaux and plates of freedom fries. Oh, how we needed a Superman.

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Then came the official news conference—at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Manhattan—Lance in suit and purple Windsor knot (last made fashionable by Ronald Reagan), sport's greatest cyclist announcing not that he was throwing his hat in the ring for political office (as many believe he eventually will) but rather that, at the age of 37, it was time to get back on the saddle again after several profligate years chasing celebrity wheel (during which he fell off the back of the Tory Burch-Kate Hudson-Random Model peloton and was spotted tickling tonsils with 21-year-old Ashley, of the wee Olsen twins). But now, his rallying call mixed grandiosity and star power with an overarching humanitarian imperative: He was riding not just to win the Tour, but in the name of all cancer victims. . .everywhere! To stamp out the disease once and for all! This wasn't about a bike race: It was a crusade.

And great theater. Tired of Hollywood parties, running marathons and buffing himself on beaches with buddy Matthew McConaughey, one of the most brash, voracious athletes of all time was reclaiming his rightful place at the start line, self-burnishing his halo. But more than that, even for the casual biking fan, his announcement brought with it a spark of something beneath the tabloid schadenfreude. There was a frisson of, dare I say, hope.

After all, Lance became ours in that ancient time when we once ruled the world, during the amped-up, supersized, morally ambiguous late Nineties of Silicon Valley IPO bonanzas. In all of this, Lance was our exceptionalism writ large. Wasn't it just like us to be diagnosed with an aggressive cancer—and put under the knife for testicular and brain surgery—and then come back to win the most grueling event in sport? Of course, to prove it wasn't a fluke, we had to win it six more times.

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But, then, it was the way we did it. The absolutely punishing dominance, the shock and awe, that Lance brought to the proposition of cycling. There were many signature moments, but one in particular stands out: Stage 10 of the 2001 Tour. Lagging behind on a three-climb day, Lance and his Posties seemed especially weak (the team was constructed for speed that year rather than grueling ascents, and then lost a key climber in a crash), while his arch rival, the German Jan Ullrich, and his team seemed fresh and strong and hungry. As the race progressed up the Col du Glandon, images of a grimacing, seemingly spent Armstrong riding at the back of the peloton were beamed to the world, including to the team cars from where the news was radioed back out to the leaders. The peloton was clearly conspiring to crush Lance, allowing breakaways without giving chase, all with the understanding that Team Postal didn't have the legs to reel anyone in. Ullrich and his team took off toward Alpe d'Huez, the Tour's most fabled climb, pulling the peloton with them, Lance just barely hanging on now. How ugly could it get?

Except something remarkable happened then, just as Lance appeared closest to his demise: He went nuts, on the attack, over the top! Suddenly, insanely, he went from shriveled leaf to a piston-pumping uphill explosion, clipping riders one by one until he drew even with Ullrich, who was now having his own reckoning with gravity. Lance hovered for a famous moment there, glaring over his shoulder at the German in what became known as "The Look," a glare that meant to say, if you think you got game, squid, c'mon!then consequently quashed the entire field, literally "dancing on his bike," as one announcer put it, riding alone for the last 20 minutes of the stage. ("A coup de poker" was Lance's own appraisal after the race, revealing that the grimaces had been staged, that the entire ride had been a tactical rope-a-dope.) One could almost hear the air go out of the peloton's collective tire.

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The unimpeachable iconoclastthe one who can boldly outwit and outplay the competitionholds an exalted place in our American cosmology, and now, plainly, there are fewer left (alas, even Warren Buffett has banana-cream pie on his face). But with legions of adoring Livestrong fans, a battery of lawyers repelling all claims and charges, and his magnanimous offer to race at no salary, Lance shimmers on. He manages to be mildly collegial and spitefully vengeful, both at once. When prying journalists play the doping card, he plays the cancer card (the cause of 20,000 deaths a day, he's quick to point out). When they play the hero card, he plays the humble domestique. When anyone attacks, he drops triple the payload, Machiavelli-style ("You are not worth the chair you're sitting on," he sneered during one press conference to a reporter who asked what it was about "dopers" that he "admired so much.")

He's the predator doubling as altruistic disease-slayer, the swashbuckler who comes pathologically prepared, the randy swordsman who also manages to be a devout father, the teammate who alwaysalwaysplays by his own rules in the sport's biggest race. . .etc., and so on. Not only does Lance embody our dreams and higher aspirations, he embodies our complexityand a shadow side we'd sooner forget. (For example, being a paragon of human rights, fair elections and sound economics, we have most recently brought the world Abu Ghraib, the ballot scandals and one hell of a financial meltdown. . .etc., and so on.)

Of course, as we've suffered our global comeuppance, not everyone has applauded Lance's return. The haters call him Pharmstrong and castigate his ego, his arrogance, his dalliances (the latest of which has led to a babyborn one month before the Tour), and his presumption. And then there are the French, whose piquant disdain for the Texan has found articulation in Tours past by death threats, storms of spit and spray-painted messages on the pavement reading EPO Lance and Armstrong pig. With his announcement last September, it was the French who immediately began nitpicking technicalities, highlighting again the 2005 L'Equipe article in which several of Lance's 1999 urine samples were reported to bear evidence of doping. (In classic Lance form, he had already phoned the president of France directly to garner his support.)

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But such well-worn and seemingly neutralized grievancesall those ghosts of Tours pastwill probably ride with Lance long past his actual ability to ride anymore. What has felt way more hurtful to some of us in this painful year of our collapse is just how human Lance has appeared on the bike, riding tentatively and mechanically, getting dropped here and there. As we watched, not knowing whether he was sandbagging, he looked all too ordinary much of the spring, lugging all of that star wattage and megalomaniacal baggage behind him.

And yethow to say this politely? As nice and clean and long-suffering as Levi Leipheimer has been, or as gifted as the Spaniards have proven themselves to be (after all, Carlos Sastre, Alberto Contador and Oscar Pereiro have won the last three Tours), or as thrilling as it can be to watch a rider like the Russian Denis Menchov, why would it be that we still really, really wanteven needLance to win?

Maybe it's that in this time of fear, what we love about Lance, when we love him, is his dark, inbred fearlessnessand his power to invoke fear, even in himself, which spurs his body to greater heights while the peloton seems to slag off somewhere in the trembling mist behind him. Maybe there's something powerful in the idea of Lance being Lance again, fueled by that old lust to be king of the mountain mixed with just the perfect confusing amount of magnanimity.

And on that summer day on Mont Ventoux, as Lance perhaps reels in the Russian rider and busts past the Italian, when he bullies the Brit and overruns the French, when he fixes his eyes on the Spaniard and asks his 37-year-old self to respond, we may have another feeling that, in this new era of American paranoia, we haven't felt in a long time: Sure, the end may be near, but in these last high mountains of hope, with perhaps the most ambiguous hero of our times at the helm, anythingeven that maillot jaune we once wore so wantonly may still be possible.

Michael Paterniti's new book, The Telling Room, will be released in 2010.

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